Biden gets in touch with voters

Tuesday

Sep 25, 2012 at 12:01 AMSep 25, 2012 at 10:59 AM

MANCHESTER, N.H. - Yes, Joe Biden gives a lot of stump speeches. But, no, that is not the most indelible part of his campaign style. Whenever his motorcade, with the Secret Service and the flashing lights, makes an unannounced stop at a simple diner, coffee shop or Dairy Queen, the vice president of the United States moves in close - very close.

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Yes, Joe Biden gives a lot of stump speeches.

But, no, that is not the most indelible part of his campaign style.

Whenever his motorcade, with the Secret Service and the flashing lights, makes an unannounced stop at a simple diner, coffee shop or Dairy Queen, the vice president of the United States moves in close — very close.

Outside the Airport Diner here on Saturday, Biden shook Samantha Mullin’s hand while stroking her left forearm. He placed a hand on one shoulder. He put his other hand on her other shoulder. As he looked into her eyes, he touched her cheek.

The encounter lasted no more than 30 seconds, and Biden was on to the next voter.

Biden is a touch person, draping arms around people’s shoulders to pose for a picture and then keeping them draped while continuing to chat. At a high school in New Hampshire on Friday, he fielded a question from a history teacher, Kayleigh Durkin, 26, by extending a hand to draw her into the center of a circle of students with him. While he spoke, he continued to hold her hand, as though they were a high-school couple going steady.

Did it feel awkward?

“No, I was so excited,” Durkin said later. “I love him.”

That is a common-enough reaction from people, usually women, whom the vice president pulls into his close encounters.

“It was out of my comfort zone but not uncomfortable,” said Christina Funk, 29, a critical-care nurse who welled up while the vice president told her recently at a Wisconsin sandwich shop how important

nurses are.

“His body language — facing me with both hands on my shoulders, standing face to face only about an inch and a half away from mine and unrelenting eye contact — combined with the genuine sincerity of his words” are what “brought tears to my eyes,” Funk said in an email.

Politicians have always pressed the flesh. But few relish doing so as heartily as Biden. His old-fashioned style turns out to be well-suited to an age in which a photograph of a spontaneous encounter with a voter can spread through social media and deliver the impression that politicians are just like us.

Two weeks ago, an image of a pizza shop owner in Florida hoisting President Barack Obama off the ground

ricocheted around the Internet just a day after one surfaced of Biden pulling a woman in motorcycle leathers nearly into his lap at a diner in Portsmouth, Ohio.

The visits are hardly casual; an advance team typically spends a week preparing for Biden’s arrival, carefully selecting locations for unannounced drop-ins as well as conventional rallies.

On the Republican side, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the vice presidential nominee, is a man comfortable in his own skin when he sits down for a hot dog at a restaurant, though he has done far fewer of those drop-ins lately. Mitt Romney rarely pops up in public unannounced, reinforcing a theme that has dogged him during his campaign — that he lacks a common touch.

As Biden worked his way around the Acoustic Cafe in Eau Claire, Wis., this month, he snatched crackers and other tidbits off diners’ plates. Posing for a picture with his arms around two women, he glanced back at a group of men and said, “Hard work, guys.”

But Biden’s loosey-goosey style also has the potential to get him into trouble, adding to a decades-old reputation that he is gaffe-prone and undisciplined.

After introducing himself to a table of Greek-Americans at a coffee shop last month by saying, “ I’m Joe Bidenopoulos,” Biden was accused of insensitivity in an effort to court ethnic voters. “ Vice President Joe Biden mocked a Greek,” the conservative Weekly Standard wrote.

As it happened, Biden encountered another table of Greek-Americans at the Airport Diner on Saturday, and he sought to set the record straight.

Describing his Aug. 31 visit to the Mocha House in Warren, Ohio, he recounted that one of three older Greek men had told him, “They tell me you’re Greek.”

“I said, ‘My name is Joe Bidenopoulos,’ because he had just said that,” Biden told the New Hampshire diners. The news media, he said, “played it like Biden’s pretending to be Greek.”

Nearly the entire time, his arm was wrapped around the shoulder of Marika Spirou, whose husband, Chris Spirou, is a former chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party.

Spirou later said the gesture had been respectful. It is “very normal” for Greeks to be physically affectionate with friends, she said: “We’re very ‘touch,’ very emotional.”

It was her husband who, seeing some of that in Biden years ago, began calling him Joe Bidenopoulos.